Haven: a colony world orbiting Gliese 687.
Hela: an icy moon in the 107 Piscium system, orbiting the gas giant Haldora.
Hyperpig: pig-human chimera of human-level intelligence.
Hypometric: a class of technologies involving manipulation of spacetime at the Planck or sub-Planck level.
Inhibitors: self-replication robots of alien origin, utilising cube-like modular sub-elements of variable size. Also known as wolves.
Lighthugger: any large space vehicle with a relativistic cruise ceiling.
Medichine: subcellular nanotechnology, usually of a biomedical rather than military/cybernetic nature.
Melding Plague: nanotechnological virus of probable alien origin, responsible for collapse of the Demarchist golden age in 2510.
Nestbuilders: symbiotic intelligences who have retained starfaring capability despite the emergence of the Inhibitors.
Norte: a language incorporating elements of English and Spanish.
Pattern Jugglers: amorphous, aquatic alien organisms forming a single information processing entity. Jugglers have been encountered on several isolated worlds, implying some earlier seeding programme. Jugglers record and update the neural patterns of sentient organisms entering their seas.
Reefersleep: the cryogenic freezing technology adopted by Demarchists, Conjoiners and Ultras.
Russish: a language derived from Russian and English elements.
Rust Belt: in post-plague years, the band of mainly ruined habitats still orbiting Yellowstone.
Torpor: a less advanced form of hibernation technology compared to reefersleep, suitable only for short intervals.
Ultras: a loose, anarchic affliliation of starship crews (derived from a variety of factions) who spend their entire lives on ships, often at relativistic speed.
Wolves: informal term for the Inhibitors.
Yellowstone: the major settled world in the Epsilon Eridani system, home to Chasm City.
A NOTE ON CHRONOLOGY
When I began writing this novel I had a story in mind, one that I hoped would fit into the existing chronology of events laid out by other books and stories set in the Revelation Space universe. Things are rarely that simple.
The principal events that happen in the foreground of this novel are indeed broadly compatible with the existing canon, since they mostly take place after Absolution Gap, chronologically the last novel in the sequence before now. The only exception is the framing passages in AG, which are set further in the future again – around about the year 3300.
Where we run into difficulties is in the latter stages of the novel, and how those events mesh with the timeline of Galactic North.
Irravel’s narrative in that story has her communing with a representative of the Nestbuilders around a star in the Hyades, in the year 2931. It’s clear from Irravel’s discussion that humans have already deployed Nestbuilder weaponry against the Inhibitors, just as they are setting out to do in 2858, at the conclusion of Inhibitor Phase. While these dates might not seem to contradict each other, on closer inspection they introduce a difficulty.
Although it might be 2931 by Irravel’s reckoning, the latest news she could hope to receive from back home would be from about 2780, a century and a half earlier. That’s because the Hyades star cluster is very much further out than any of the locations we’ve visited in this or the other novels.
The first and least problematic get-out is to assume that the entry in Irravel’s narrative must be considered erroneous. Her next entry isn’t for another four hundred years, so there’s plenty of room to adjust the chronology without throwing her timeline out of joint.
The second approach is to assume that, since Irravel is clearly heading further and further from Earth, she has decided that she no longer needs to synchronise her clocks to any local reference frame. By that reckoning, although she calls it 2931, the real date when the signals reach her would be nearer to 3080, from the point of view of someone on Earth. The later dates in her narrative can be reconciled with Irravel making stopovers, following a circuitous route, or just changing her mind.
As for the framing events in Absolution Gap, these remain consistent within the timeline regardless of either assumption above.
CREDITS
Alastair Reynolds and Gollancz would like to thank everyone at Orion who worked on the publication of Inhibitor Phase in the UK.
Editorial
Gillian Redfearn
Brendan Durkin
Copy editor
Abigail Nathan
Proof reader
Jane Howard
Audio
Paul Stark
Amber Bates
Contracts
Anne Goddard
Paul Bulos
Jake Alderson
Design
Joanna Ridley
Nick May
Marketing
Lucy Cameron
Production
Paul Hussey
Editorial Management
Charlie Panayiotou
Jane Hughes
Finance
Jasdip Nandra
Afeera Ahmed
Sue Baker
Publicity
Will O’Mullane
Sales
Jen Wilson
Esther Waters
Victoria Laws
Ellie Kyrke-Smith
Frances Doyle
Georgina Cutler
Jack Hallam
Operations
Jo Jacobs
Sharon Willis
Lisa Pryde
Lucy Brem
Also by Alastair Reynolds from Gollancz:
Novels
Century Rain
Pushing Ice
House of Suns
Terminal World
The Medusa Chronicles (with Stephen Baxter)
Revelation Space
Revelation Space
Redemption Ark
Absolution Gap
Chasm City
Inhibitor Phase
Poseidon’s Children
Blue Remembered Earth
On the Steel Breeze
Poseidon’s Wake
Revenger
Revenger
Shadow Captain
Bone Silence
The Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies
Aurora Rising (previously published as The Prefect)
Elysium Fire
Short Story Collections:
Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days
Galactic North
Zima Blue
Beyond the Aquila Rift
Slow Bullets (novella)
COPYRIGHT
First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Gollancz
an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK Company
Copyright © Dendrocopos Ltd 2021
The moral right of Alastair Reynolds to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (eBook) 978 0 575 09075 0
Typeset by Input Data Services Ltd, Somerset
www.alastairreynolds.com
www.gollancz.co.uk
Table of Contents
To my wife, for being there.
INHIBITOR PHASE
PREFACE
Part One
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER
THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
Part Two
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
Part Three
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Part Four
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Chapter Twenty
Part Five
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Part Six
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
Part Seven
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
END NOTES
KEY CHARACTERS IN THE TIMELINE
SELECTED GLOSSARY
A NOTE ON CHRONOLOGY
CREDITS
Also by Alastair Reynolds from Gollancz:
COPYRIGHT
Inhibitor Phase Page 58